Before the first shot in a war there is mostly a political prologue to it

[mapuc]

A few days ago I saw the this great movie

Gods and Generals which is about the American civil war

Have seen this movie before a few times, this time it made my think.

I have read a lot about the military history regarding this war, but I haven't read so much about the political prologue to this war.

Does the American historian know where the first step to wards this war was taken ?

Markus

[Oberon]

4th July 1776 I'd wager.


EDIT: In all seriousness, I'd say that the issue flared up during the westward expansion, west of the Mississippi to be precise, and the arguements over whether these new states would be 'free states' or 'slave states', the arguement over who got what and then who decided who got what, which then merged into the ethicality of slavery when Lincoln was elected in 1860 and became a war about who decided what states could and couldn't do.

That's a pretty basic run down of it.

[Sailor Steve]

"Any man who takes it upon himself to explain the causes of the Civil War deserves whatever grief comes his way, regardless of his good intentions."
-From the article cited in the following link. I could not find where the name of the author is mentioned.


Oberon, that's not a bad summation. For the full story the best place to start is here (http://www.historynet.com/causes-of-the-civil-war).

[mapuc]

"Any man who takes it upon himself to explain the causes of the Civil War deserves whatever grief comes his way, regardless of his good intentions."
-From the article cited in the following link. I could not find where the name of the author is mentioned.


Oberon, that's not a bad summation. For the full story the best place to start is here (http://www.historynet.com/causes-of-the-civil-war).

First of all thank you for presenting me this great link

In my school days I was told the reason for the war was the election of Abraham Lincoln- when thinking this can't be the only reason

Watching the first page on the page you gave me, I can see the Election of Abraham Lincoln is last in event "Causes Of The Civil War Summary"

Got some reading to do.

Have after I saw this movie tried to find some Danish and/or Swedish book about this, with no success everyone was about the war itself.

Markus

[Sailor Steve]

You say you like Gods & Generals. Have you seen Gettysburg? It takes place after, but was filmed years earlier, and is the better movie.

The writing of the US Constitution was not a cause of the American Civil War, but has ties to it. The biggest argument of the Constitutional Debates (May-September 1787) was the question of representation. The original Virginia Plan, written by James Madison and presented by the Virginia delegation to the Convention, proposed that one representative be elected to represent a certain amount of people. Other delegates objected. The States at that time considered themselves individual countries, only willing to submit themselves to a greater government where it was absolutely necessary, and felt that, like the Continental Congress created during the Revolution, each state should have one representative.

Madison argued that under the Virginia plan the people would be represented, and the government was to be for the people, not the States. The others argued that the bigger states, like Virginia and Pennsylvania, would rule everything and the smaller states, having fewer representatives, would get, as we say, "the short end of the stick." The Virginians argued that with the States being represented equally the people of the larger states would suffer, since a million people in a big state would have one representative, the same as fifty thousand people in a small state.

They finally settled on the system we have today - the Senate, with two members representing each State, and the House of Representatives, with one Representative for a certain number of people.

During all this the Southern States said that since they had so few people they would be cheated on any decision, and came up with the idea that the slaves should be counted as well as the free citizens of the States for the purpose of representation. The Northern States objected that this would be cheating, because the slaves themselves would not be represented, being considered only property, and because the Southern States would receive extra representation based on people who could not themselves vote.

The Southern States threatened to take no further part in the new country if their demands were not granted. The Northern delegates, believing that the country could not survive unless all thirteen States became members, gave in to the Southerners' demands. The compromise made at that time was that five slaves would be equal to three free men for the purpose of representation. This has led in recent times to Black apologists saying that the Founding Fathers only considered a black man to be worth three-fifths of a white man. This was not true, but it's easy to see why they would feel this way.

That decision did not directly affect events that followed, but it does show the basic underlying problem that beset the young United States.

[clive bradbury]

In a wider sense, I think you can see the causes of many 19th and 20th century wars as a part of the move towards modernity.

The South might be seen as a society attempting to stem the tide of modern industrial society embodied in the North. As might be the Zulu nation, US Indians, China v Japan, etc. In each case you might interpret the conflicts as an eventually futile attempt to stop the spread of modern industrialised societies.

[Aktungbby]

Does the American historian know where the first step towards this war was taken ?

Markus "Any man who takes it upon himself to explain the causes of the Civil War deserves whatever grief comes his way, regardless of his good intentions."
My major in college: and I still can't put my finger on the cause: but all warfare is ultimately a morality clash with economics. The southern economy was based and underwritten on the value of slaves as property; it's right to expand into new territories vs a growing movement including internationally of moralistic abolition in the midst of the proto-industrial revolution and the rise of free labor. That concept alone kept England and France from aiding the South (especially when Lincoln issued the emancipation proclamation) in the conflict with the industrialized North. England astutely switched to the Egyptian cotton. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_colonial_United_States (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_colonial_United_States)

Acting on the advice of President Thomas Jefferson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson), who denounced the international trade as "violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa, in which the morality, the reputation, and the best interests of our country have long been eager to proscribe" in 1807 Congress banned the international slave trade. However, the domestic slave trade continued. Even ol TJ couldn't keep his head straight on this one: :timeout: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-dark-side-of-thomas-jefferson-35976004/?no-ist=&preview=_page%3D2_no-ist&page=3 (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-dark-side-of-thomas-jefferson-35976004/?no-ist=&preview=_page%3D2_no-ist&page=3)
In another communication from the early 1790s, Jefferson takes the 4 percent formula further and quite bluntly advances the notion that slavery presented an investment strategy for the future. He writes that an acquaintance who had suffered financial reverses “should have been invested in negroes.” He advises that if the friend’s family had any cash left, “every farthing of it [should be] laid out in land and negroes, which besides a present support bring a silent profit of from 5. to 10. per cent in this country by the increase in their value.”
The irony is that Jefferson sent his 4 percent formula to George Washington, who freed his slaves, precisely because slavery had made human beings into money, like “Cattle in the market,” and this disgusted him. Yet Jefferson was right, prescient, about the investment value of slaves. A startling statistic emerged in the 1970s, when economists taking a hardheaded look at slavery found that on the eve of the Civil War, enslaved black people, in the aggregate, formed the second most valuable capital asset in the United States. David Brion Davis sums up their findings: “In 1860, the value of Southern slaves was about three times the amount invested in manufacturing or railroads nationwide.” The only asset more valuable than the black people was the land itself. The formula Jefferson had stumbled upon became the engine not only of Monticello but of the entire slaveholding South and the Northern industries, shippers, banks, insurers and investors who weighed risk against returns and bet on slavery. The words Jefferson used—“their increase”—became magic words. Jefferson’s 4 percent theorem threatens the comforting notion that he had no real awareness of what he was doing, that he was “stuck” with or “trapped” in slavery, an obsolete, unprofitable, burdensome legacy. The date of Jefferson’s calculation aligns with the waning of his emancipationist fervor. Jefferson began to back away from antislavery just around the time he computed the silent profit of the “peculiar institution.”
And this world was crueler than we have been led to believe. A letter has recently come to light describing how Monticello’s young black boys, “the small ones,” age 10, 11 or 12, were whipped to get them to work in Jefferson’s nail factory, whose profits paid the mansion’s grocery bills. This passage about children being lashed had been suppressed—deliberately deleted from the published record in the 1953 edition of Jefferson’s Farm Book, containing 500 pages of plantation papers. That edition of the Farm Book still serves as a standard reference for research into the way Monticello worked.
By 1789, Jefferson planned to shift away from growing tobacco at Monticello, whose cultivation he described as “a culture of infinite wretchedness.” Tobacco wore out the soil so fast that new acreage constantly had to be cleared, engrossing so much land that food could not be raised to feed the workers and requiring the farmer to purchase rations for the slaves. (In a strangely modern twist, Jefferson had taken note of the measurable climate change in the region: The Chesapeake region was unmistakably cooling and becoming inhospitable to heat-loving tobacco that would soon, he thought, become the staple of South Carolina and Georgia.) He visited farms and inspected equipment, considering a new crop, wheat, and the exciting prospect it opened before him.
The cultivation of wheat revitalized the plantation economy and reshaped the South’s agricultural landscape. Planters all over the Chesapeake region had been making the shift. (George Washington had begun raising grains some 30 years earlier because his land wore out faster than Jefferson’s did.) Jefferson continued to plant some tobacco because it remained an important cash crop, but his vision for wheat farming was rapturous: “The cultivation of wheat is the reverse [of tobacco] in every circumstance. Besides cloathing the earth with herbage, and preserving its fertility, it feeds the labourers plentifully, requires from them only a moderate toil, except in the season of harvest, raises great numbers of animals for food and service, and diffuses plenty and happiness among the whole.”
Wheat farming forced changes in the relationship between planter and slave. Tobacco was raised by gangs of slaves all doing the same repetitive, backbreaking tasks under the direct, strict supervision of overseers. Wheat required a variety of skilled laborers, and Jefferson’s ambitious plans required a retrained work force of millers, mechanics, carpenters, smiths, spinners, coopers, and plowmen and plowmen.
Jefferson still needed a cohort of “labourers in the ground” to carry out the hardest tasks, so the Monticello slave community became more segmented and hierarchical. They were all slaves, but some slaves would be better than others. The majority remained laborers; above them were enslaved artisans (both male and female); above them were enslaved managers; above them was the household staff. The higher you stood in the hierarchy, the better clothes and food you got; you also lived literally on a higher plane, closer to the mountaintop. A small minority of slaves received pay, profit sharing or what Jefferson called “gratuities,” while the lowest workers received only the barest rations and clothing. Differences bred resentment, especially toward the elite household staff.

[mapuc]

Thank you Aktungbby for your answer

Your answer and the information in the link Steve gave my tell my one thing

There ain't one specific cause that lead to the civil war. There were some

Some small step and some major steps.

By reading the articles about causes of the Civil War on this Historynet.com

I may figure out what could have been the small step and the major steps to wards the first shot.

Or you Aktungbby or Steve may know what these step were or believe what it may have been.


By the way. After I had replied Steve's post earlier today I saw he had made a change and had added this

"Any man who takes it upon himself to explain the causes of the Civil War deserves whatever grief comes his way, regardless of his good intentions."

Made me wonder for a second if my post and question was OK

There are in my two nature language some books about this war. It's mostly about the war itself and have very little prologue to the war- I guess I need to buy books from USA books that goes political before the war or something like that.

Markus

[Admiral Halsey]

I always figure you can figure out the true cause of a war with multiple causes by removing one of them. If you do that and the it's generally agreed that yes the war wouldn't have happened if the problem wasn't around that that's generally the true cause. For the American Civil War the answer is slavery, simple as that. One can cite economic differences, state's right's, Lincolns election or anything else that they want but take slavery out of the equation and the war never happens it's that simple.

[Sailor Steve]

By the way. After I had replied Steve's post earlier today I saw he had made a change and had added this

"Any man who takes it upon himself to explain the causes of the Civil War deserves whatever grief comes his way, regardless of his good intentions."

Made me wonder for a second if my post and question was OK
Your question was fine. I included the quote because I had never heard it before, and from my experience it is so very true. Discussions of the causes of our Civil War often lead to huge fights, almost as if the War is still going on. It was aimed at myself and anyone else who tries to keep a level head in these debates. After one hundred and fifty years people still become very passionate about that war.

Read this old thread.
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=167597&highlight=civil+war